


the prisoner's dilemma

by thebeespatella



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Amputation, F/F, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:01:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21597301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/thebeespatella
Summary: They fall like birds of prey—sudden and screaming. Through binoculars, she watches them totter-waltz on the crest of the cliff, pike gracefully downward in the air to hit the water with a splash only slightly more significant than the waves lapping at the side of her boat. This is, she thinks wryly, a most unconventional way to rendezvous; all three of us. But convention has brought her neither here nor there, and the wind is with her, so she hoists the sail and steers toward madness.
Relationships: Chiyoh/Bedelia Du Maurier, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23
Collections: #HanniBelles2019, Fandom Loves Puerto Rico - Charity Fundraiser 2017





	the prisoner's dilemma

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EmilyElm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmilyElm/gifts).



> For EmilyElm—thank you so much for helping with Fandom Loves Puerto Rico. I recall that you asked me to just keep writing, so here's something I've been nursing for a very long time. I hope it qualifies.
> 
> Thank you also to moishpan, whose beautiful Chiyoh/Bedelia art sparked this entire story.
> 
> And, as always, thanks to clicktrack_heart for looking over this and every other scrap of writing I produce, and only ever making it better. 
> 
> I don't use the 'h' in Chiyo for the sole reason that I am a pedant.

She doesn’t bother trying to cover her tracks; she knows it would only annoy him, at best. At worst—well. She’s seen the bodies. (Who hasn’t.) So when a letter arrives, addressed in perfect penmanship— _Chiyo-chan: There have been an unusual dearth of game birds this autumn_ —she’s unsurprised, at best. At worst—well, what’s the point of having a worst-case-scenario when it comes to Hannibal Lecter? He is the worst case: Exhibit A, a beast double-caged in its skin then imprisoned; sixty-four seals away from Lucifer, still two padlocks closer than any human. 

They had spoken of stability, but it was as blinded crows squalling at each other across telephone poles. The foremost quality of a stable element is neutrality, and they’d existed as polarities their entire adult lives.

Both lived exclusively by principles: she, stoic at the gates of withholding with a three-pound pull; he, extracting three pounds of flesh from every bad impulse he met. 

Time passes; it doesn’t change. 

Now, they both find themselves astride the threshold of perspective. She’s cleaning her gun. He’s languishing in wait. 

And then there’s the question of Will Graham. She considers what Hannibal would want, and hovers for a time along the rugged fingers of Maine’s coastal waters. Cold, bright, with black trees like antlers. She watches, unseen, until Will meets an incandescent single mother outside a dog shelter, and he smiles. Smiles without questions of death glittering in the corners. Without his glass wings, Graham is almost unrecognizable to her. That’s when she knows it’s time to move on. He is safe here, alone as he is. It suits him almost better than yearning. 

Time goes forward like a train into the dark, and she, a mere guest, as unwitting as the next passenger.

&

Chiyo shoots to kill, except when she shoots to maim. Survival is overrated. 

She studies their unalikenesses as she plucks grim feathers from a mallard that she’s left to age so it’s prime for consumption. Its plumage is in full redolence. Its eyes are open. But neither of them see the darkness coming until, struck mid-flight, bitter with shock, it’s far too late. 

Has she merely been left to age? She used to think Hannibal had clipped her wings; perhaps he’d meant only to leave her afraid to fly.  


&

She could see the question in Will’s eyes the first time he heard her tell the story of the prisoner. Will sat and politely sipped his tea under a surprisingly opaque mask, but she was and remains an old hat at unspoken questions. _And what happened,_ he’d wanted to ask, _with all the time that was stolen from you?_

“All these years, I did what we do best, Mr. Graham,” she’d said with a slow smile. “I learned to be alone.”

“Don’t know how well I did with that,” he replied. They both watched the tendril of steam yearn from the mouth of the teapot. “Seeing where I’ve found myself.”

“Do you mean Aukštaitija; Lecter Castle?” she said. “Sitting in this room? Or even here—across from me?”

He looked down into his lap, a relief for both of them. The suggestion of a tear welled like dew in the corner of his eye. _You’ve taught him well, Hannibal._ She has a thousand thoughts like these a day, like a chain of paper cranes setting each other aflame. The thousand paper cranes are an atomic invention, born of ashes and white shadows and Murasaki-sama had been borne on that fire, marrying her oligarch to leave her burned out home. Trading one ruined castle for another. That sense of burden did not translate to her nephew, who was free to display her family’s armor in his bedroom with none of the consequences of wearing it. 

“Do you believe in fate?” he’d asked, finally.

“That is yet to be determined.” 

“Because Hannibal made sure I could only ever smile around him,” Will said. “And that it always, always aches. I need to find him.”

“Follow your gut,” she suggested. 

If the look he tossed her were any less casual it might have been called a glare. “Well, thank you for your help.”

She should’ve known. 

&

They fall like birds of prey—sudden and screaming. Through binoculars, she watches them totter-waltz on the crest of the cliff, pike gracefully downward in the air to hit the water with a splash only slightly more significant than the waves lapping at the side of her boat. This is, she thinks wryly, a most unconventional way to rendezvous; all three of us. But convention has brought her neither here nor there, and the wind is with her, so she hoists the sail and steers toward madness.

She arrives at their clinging, floating bodies, the prow of the boat just peeking over their bodies. “He’s out,” he yells across the waves, and she tosses him a line. He ties it around Hannibal first, then hauls himself aboard. 

“Secure your own mask before assisting others,” he says with an odd little smile, and she can see that he’s running on fear alone, heart thudding a jittering imprint on the outside of his cheek in rivulets of blood. He’ll make it a few more days; he’s bitter enough. After that? Time keeps its secrets closer and closer by the second. Together they pull up Hannibal’s waterlogged body. It’s doing a good imitation of death, lips pale, pulse weak. 

Will can only watch as she takes a blade from her belt, flips it open. It’s golden in the bobbing light of the one lantern she dares keep lit. The sea has washed him clean of much of other people’s blood; it’s his own, still churning out sluggishly to stain his face and his hands, that he has to worry about. “The water was cold,” she says, kneeling next to Hannibal. 

Will nods, vigorous with shivers. 

“Go.” She hands him the lantern and points him in the direction of the cabin, a vague looming silhouette on the deck. “There are clothes and bandages in a box under the bed. Bring them here. Put your wet things in the bucket.” She brings the knife toward Hannibal’s neck, and Will’s eyes follow it. He can’t still be hungry, can he? After the theater on the bluff. But there is no time. She cuts open Hannibal’s sweater, a smooth tear along the fabric. “I do not want to move him. We don’t know what’s broken.”

“He—he took our weight.”

“I know.” Chiyo looks up at him. “I watched you fall. Do not waste it. Go.” She gets up after he leaves to tack the sail, pull the boom vang taut and leave the bluff behind. It’s quick work, and she’s right back by Hannibal’s side. She divests him of his trousers, checking for bones at odd angles. So far they have been extraordinarily lucky, considering—only bruising eating his sides in purple splotches, cracked ribs, a dislocated shoulder, a fractured arm, where Hannibal had thrown it out to bear the brunt of the impact.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of the gunshot wound. 

Will comes back, only wearing the light drawstring pants she had left in there for them. “I, uh. I brought this. For him.”

She almost laughs at the coy and determined way the man thrusts a folded blanket at her without looking down. “You will have time to be embarrassed later,” she says. “Now, bring me the plant on the windowsill.” 

“The what?” She gives him a look that brokers no questions, so he goes anyway, and sets it down next to the blanket and the box he’d brought out before. 

“Help me move him.” She spreads out the blanket and they gently ease Hannibal’s mangled body onto it; or, as gently as possible, considering the blood leaking out of Will’s shoulder and face. Chiyo watches him. The blood is black in the moonlight, despite, or perhaps especially because of, how fresh it is. He will ruin his new clothes in no time. 

She knows their vessel. She doesn’t need the light as she flits to the cabin, pulling off her coat and tossing it across the foot of the bed. Rolls up her sleeves to wash her hands as thoroughly as possible, cleaning underneath blunt nails, and brings the bucket under the sink with her. Buckets are the most useful household item, even if your home is another person. When she comes back, Will has Hannibal’s head in his lap and is staring at the flat line of the ocean. She nudges the bucket under Will’s shoulder wound, and inspects it. Clean, barely any wiggling of the blade. Not a through wound. “You will not be able to move as you are used to, even after this heals.”

He shrugs with the other shoulder. Retorts: “It’s better than being shot.”

There is no good answer to that, so she dips into the box and opens a fresh bottle of disinfectant to pour over the injury, and he gasps. It makes the audible hissing noise of cleanliness, like putting out a cigarette. It is soothing. Another moon, another wound. Then she pulls the plant toward her to scrape moss off the large rocks with her knife. “His aunt would disapprove of killing this plant in service of man,” she says. “Would find it most uncouth.”

“And you? Do you disapprove?”

She looks directly at him as she pushes the moss into his shoulder. “I tolerate.” He scowls at her. “His aunt was brittle. I have learned to withstand the world’s edges better than she did.”

“What happened to her?”

“That is not my story to tell,” Chiyo says. She tapes one edge of the bandage down, and rolls it across the expanse of his chest, over his shoulder, and twice again. Then she puts her hand on his face to tilt it over the bucket, cleans the wound. 

“You were her attendant.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Did he—?”

“Shh,” she says, holding his jaw closed as she packs it so he can be spared voicing his questions. “Speaking will only aggravate your injury.” She tapes a bandage firmly over it, shoves down the sudden playful impulse to hold his mouth closed for as long as it will take to heal, to accept. “Put your clothes on and try not to move,” she says instead, one of those helpfully useless medical platitudes, and turns to her charge. 

On long rainy days by the aluminum light of one of the great window sills in her drawing room, Lady Murasaki had taught her how to set bones and patch up wounds—in her words, _just in case_ she found something on the grounds, a rabbit, perhaps, or a cat, in need of aid. Chiyo suspects Murasaki-sama had known the kind of big cats she’d be tending to—but cats that got shot were usually meant to die. 

But what of Hannibal, who would not die. How does one tend a wounded god? A god like those the Greeks burned bones to, petty and reckless and giving as good as they got. She leans down to listen to his heart, beating low, steep like the tide. His closed eyelids flutter like moth’s wings. 

“He’s losing blood too fast,” Will rasps. 

She passes him the medical tape. “Make me small strips. About three centimeters.” Off his hapless gaze, she adds, “Around an inch?” He peels and rips, sticking them to the back of his hand. Peels, and sticks. Peels and sticks. She can’t tell him to stop, and flushes the front of the gunshot wound instead, then pushes a knee under Hannibal’s hip to angle him sideways. He is lucky; it goes all the way through. Two rough perihepatic packs out of gauze—they’ll have to change the dressings often. Mindlessly she reaches to take some tape off of the back of Will’s hand, the edge of her fingernail scraping against skin—they make a moment’s scalding eye contact. She winds the gauze around Hannibal’s middle, not too tight. 

“What have you been eating?” she murmurs to herself. “Going to use up all the supplies.”

Will says nothing. She splints Hannibal’s forearm; considers resetting his shoulder but decides against the risk, and binds the whole thing up in a sling. 

“Now we move him.” Chiyo gets up to help, but Will has gathered Hannibal up, one arm at the bend in his knees, the other cradling his back, and carries him into the cabin, in an apt reflection of when she’d seen them last. His shoulder must be screaming. She pushes the door open for him, and follows when he collapses them both on the bed. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Been told that before,” Will says, panting and letting his head fall back on the headboard. His bitterness is running out—just enough to lift Hannibal onto the bed, and now it’s exhausted. 

“You will not survive alone. He will not survive the aloneness.” She kneels next to the bed so they are close enough to make avoiding eye contact difficult, even for a professional such as himself. 

He swallows. “He’s got you.”

“You are the only one with whom he is not keeping score. The rest of us must mark our tallies well. It is tiresome for all of us.”

“Tiresome.” He huffs out a breath that might be laughter, might be pain. “Doesn’t he get tired. I gave up.”

“And he found an elegant nobility in leaving it up to your giving up. Some great romance in destiny. But Hannibal is always counting cards at life’s table. And so you both remain alive.” 

“Some romance.”

“Your romance.”

“I didn’t choose this.”

“Didn’t you.” A silence, as a courtesy, then she says: “I will need help caring for him. Will you help me?” she asks. “You have the option to refuse, of course—but some might consider it rude.”

“Thought he wasn’t keeping score.”

“But I am,” she says. “And keeping Hannibal alive is too much responsibility for one person to handle. I’ve been kept prisoner by morality long enough, don’t you think?”

“And it’s up to me to set you free, each time.”

“You took that away from me.” She inclines her head to breathe, to bite the head off of her volcanic rage. Ash in her mouth. “Will you help me?”

“Can I sleep on it?”

“Only if you wake up.”

He meets her eyes this time. “You evened the odds. Made sure I’d be here to say yes.”

“I am giving you a choice.” She rises, ready to give the sea her full attention. 

“Hell of a choice,” he says as she reaches the door, and she glances back over her shoulder. 

“Everything is a choice.”


End file.
